Meet the College Runner Who Also Aces Opera

Growing up just a few minutes across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, Eldon Warner was drawn to music at a young age. His grandmother taught classical music at an elementary school, while his father was passionate about rock, often jamming out to Led Zeppelin records at their home in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

“I was saturated in music as a kid,” Warner told Runner’s World. “I fell in love with singing and playing music pretty early on, when I was in elementary school. By the time I started high school, I’d decided I wanted to be a musician when I grew up.”

“I absolutely hated running my freshman year,” said Warner. “I raced a lot of miles in middle school track, and I’d had enough of it. I figured I’d just focus on choir and music in high school. But then I missed having a sport, so I tried out for the rugby team.”

Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson High School’s cross country coach kept coaxing him back to distance running. Warner finally relented in time for track season, but he still wasn’t “hungry” for competition, he said.

That came later, in his sophomore year of high school. He was running the anchor leg of a 4x800 meter relay, and his team was neck-and-neck with their rivals. After receiving the baton, he slammed down a 2:01, shaving five seconds off his 800-meter personal best.

“I became enamored with all of it, right then,” he said. “I wanted to get faster and break two minutes.”

That race propelled him to take training more seriously, and he saw his times steadily drop: By senior year, he’d clocked 1:54 for 800 meters and 4:26 for 1600. While his performances weren’t winning state championships, they left Warner wanting more after high school, so he searched for colleges where he could pursue both singing and running—which wasn’t an easy task, since a few of his dream music schools wouldn’t allow him to also compete in varsity running.

Luckily, Warner found his match at the University of South Dakota, where he’s competed on the men’s cross-country and track teams while studying musical and vocal performance since 2015. Now a 21-year-old senior, Warner just finished his cross country season as his team’s top runner, scoring an individual win at the Summit League conference championship 8K last month, where he ran 24:58.

When he’s not training, Warner devotes his free time and weekends to practicing and performing in his music school’s fall and spring operas. Over the years, the singing runner has learned how to make his two passions work in harmony with each other—even if it means sacrificing one for the other.

“There are a lot of things that relate in running and singing,” he said. “In both, you have to stay comfortable, with your shoulders relaxed and breathing controlled. If you tense up or start hyperventilating, your performance goes downhill fast onstage or on the track.”

Warner explained that when he performs an aria (a long, solo performance during an opera), he has to concentrate on not “pressing,” or straining, his voice to achieve a louder, grander sound. If he presses too much, he tires himself out much more quickly, and the rest of the song is challenging to complete.

Eldon Warner performs in the opera Die Fledermaus.

Eldon Warner

The same goes for track: “When I’m racing a mile and I feel like I’m pushing the pace uncomfortably from the gun, it’s not a good sign,” he said. “I’ve run my fastest races when I’m relaxed and loose and not thinking about going fast.”

While singing isn’t as physically demanding as running, belting out tunes during lengthy rehearsals and back-to-back performances is exhausting in its own way, Warner explained. “I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t do an opera and a meet in the same weekend,” he said.

He learned his lesson a few years ago, when his spring opera fell on the same April weekend as the competitive Drake Relays track meet in Des Moines, Iowa. Warner attempted to do both by singing in the Friday night show, then running Saturday morning, then returning to sing in the Saturday night performance. “My race was awful. I was physically and mentally drained,” he said.

While he can manage doing a small choir recital the day before a race, a larger performance—which demands long rehearsals and vocal warmups on top of the pressure to nail notes onstage—takes too much out of him. “It takes my complete concentration,” Warner said. “Afterwards, I’m wiped out.”

Luckily his coach, Dan Fitzsimmons, understands how much music means to the athlete, and allows him to miss certain races and workouts when they interfere with opera commitments. But even with his extracurricular demands, Warner maintains his mileage between 90 and 100 per week during the cross country season, and drops down to 80 for track.

Warner won the 2018 Summit League indoor track championship 800 meters in 1:54.76.

Eldon Warner

Going into his senior indoor and outdoor track seasons, his goals are to break 4:00 in the mile, 8:00 in 3,000 meters, and 1:50 in 800 meters. As far as his musical dreams, he’s planning to either study for a master’s degree in vocal performance after he graduates—his “safe route,” he said—or try to make it as a solo musician by recording and playing his own music.

Whichever route he takes after graduation, he plans to continue running—if only as a “hobby jogger” in road races.

“Running definitely makes me a better singer, by boosting my VO2 max and lung capacity,” he said. “And I think singing makes me a better runner, since it gives me an outlet to be creative and do something else. I don’t think I’d be where I am if I had one and not the other.”

Hailey MiddlebrookDigital EditorHailey first got hooked on running news as an intern with Running Times, and now she reports on elite runners and cyclists, feel-good stories, and training pieces for Runner's World and Bicycling magazines.

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